What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Which is all rather interesting, of course, but I’m assuming by now that you have a question, something along the lines of

What does any of this have to do with what we talk about when we talk about God?

Excellent question.

Three responses, then,

beginning with

energy,

and then moving to

involvement,

and then a bit about

surprise.

Energy,

involvement,

surprise.

Let’s begin with your chair, because odds are that you’re sitting in a chair while you read or listen to this book. It’s probably made of metal or wood, foam, cloth, maybe leather. A few nuts and bolts, a screw or two, some paint, perhaps some nylon or plastic as well. If we were to take that wood or steel or cloth and put it under a high-powered microscope, we would see the basic elements and molecules and compounds that comprise those materials. And if we kept going, farther and farther into those basic materials, we would eventually be at the subatomic level, where we’d discover that the chair, like everything else in the universe, is made of atoms.

And atoms,

it turns out,

are 99.9 percent empty space.

If all of the empty space was taken out of all of the atoms in the universe, the universe would fit in a sugar cube.

An atom, in the end, is a thing. But a thing that is made up mostly of empty space, which is commonly believed to not be a thing. So what exactly are you sitting on?

A chair—a tangible, material, physical object—is made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular, predictable reason.

Your chair appears to be solid,

but that solidity is a bit of an illusion.

It has weight and mass and shape and texture, and if you don’t see it in the dark and stub your toe on it, that chair will cause your toe great pain, and yet your chair is ultimately

a relationship of energy—

atoms bonded to each other in a particular way that allows you to sit on that chair and be supported. Things like chairs and tables and parking lots and planets may appear to be solid, but they are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.

I talk about all of this red shifting and dark matter and uncertainty and particle movement because most of us were taught in science class that ours is a hard, stable, tangible world that we can study and analyze because it’s there, right in front of us, and we can prove it in a lab.

Which is true.

But often another perspective came along as well, the one that declared that there is a clear distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, between the physical world and the spiritual world.

What we’re learning from science, however, is that that distinction isn’t so clear after all.

In other words, the line between

matter

and

spirit

may not be a line at all.

In an article about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson, Jeffrey Kluger writes in TIME magazine that they’re “grappling with something bigger than mere physics, something that defies the mathematical and brushes up—at least fleetingly—against the spiritual.”

Now obviously there are scientists who would bristle at any suggestion that this field of study has anything to do with the spiritual, pointing out that it’s not mystical at all but very straightforward science, but for others, brushing up against the spiritual is a great way to put it because the primary essence of reality is energy flow. Things, no matter how great their mass is or how hard or solid or apparent their thingness is, are ultimately relationships of living energy.

This energy isn’t destroyed or created—it simply changes form as it’s conserved. If you’re reading this book in printed form on paper and you were to burn it, the sum total of the book’s energy would not change; it would simply go off and be other things than this book.

The amount of actual energy in the universe would stay the same.

And you wouldn’t find out how the book ends.

Now, from energy,

let’s move to involvement.

In the common view of the world most of us grew up with, there was a clear division between the subject and the object. Think of the stereotype of the objective scientist, standing cool and detached behind a glass wall, jotting observations onto a clipboard about whatever it is being studied. There is nothing wrong with this image; in fact, we owe this kind of thinking and practice a huge debt for the stunning array of technologies and inventions and luxuries we benefit from every day.

Somebody figured out how to fit a thousand songs in our pocket. Well done there.

But this image of detachment,

standing back at a distance,

watching and examining and analyzing things from a perceived place of noninvolvement, lives on in a number of ways that aren’t true.

At the quantum level, to observe the atom is to affect it. The particle is a cloud of possibilities until it’s observed, and then it chooses a particular path. The question you ask light determines whether it will answer as a wave or a particle.

In the view many have been taught,

the world is out there,

stationary and unmoved,

unaffected by us.

But in the quantum world,

observing changes things.

Matter is ultimately energy, and our interactions with energy alter reality because we’re involved, our world an interconnected web of relationships with nothing isolated, alone, or unaffected.

Even when there is an actual glass wall—

as helpful and accurate as traditional scientific

understandings are—

there is no glass wall in the end.

Central to the isolated, detached, common modern worldview is the assumption that things exist in empty space. Us outside, looking in. Studying, analyzing, standing at a distance—observing the world that is out there in empty space.

But the quantum world teaches us that space is—what’s the best word here?—alive. Particles can be found in what appears to be empty space. The invisible substance between us and the things and people around us actually contains something.

We are enmeshed in the world around us, not outside looking in, but inside looking . . . inside.

It’s all energy,

and we’re all involved.

These two truths,

the one about energy and the one about involvement, lead us to a third truth, this one about surprise.

Your toaster doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Seriously.

As things heat up, they register different colors, each new color representing an increase in temperature. And so, according to the standard assumptions about heat and corresponding color, your toaster should glow blue.

But it doesn’t;

it glows red.

Why?

No one knows.

Which particle will pass through the glass in the shop window,

and which will reflect back? Where will that electron disappear, and when will it reappear—and where?

We can predict,

and we can identify patterns,

but at the most basic level,

we don’t know.

The world surprises us.

And it surprises scientists too,

on a regular basis.

Energy,

involvement,

and

surprise.

I talk about all of this because when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren’t taking the entire world into account. A brief reading of modern science quite quickly takes us into all sorts of interesting and compelling places where the most intelligent, up-to-date, and informed scientists are constantly surprised by just how much more there is to the universe.

III. You Dirty Star, You

Which leads us to you,

right there in the middle of it all.

Actually, we are in the middle of it all, with a human being (roughly a meter tall on average, kids included) halfway between the largest size we can comprehend, the width of the known universe, and the smallest size discovered thus far in the universe.

And you,

you are fascinating.

You lose fifty to a hundred and fifty strands of hair a day, you shed ten billion flakes of skin a day,

every twenty-eight days you get completely new skin, and every nine years your entire body is renewed.

(This dead skin we shed makes up 90 percent of household dust. So feel free to vacuum more.)

And yet your body, in the midst of this relentless shedding and dying and changing and renewing,

continues to remember to be you,

strand by strand,

flake by flake,

atom by atom.

Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are a potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.

You are an exotic combination of matter and memory, with a fine line in between.

Millions of cells, drifting through the universe, assembled and configured and finely tuned at this second to be you, but inevitably moving on in the next seconds to be other things and other people.

The atoms that make you you in this very second may have earlier been part of a stork,

or Mars,

or a mushroom,

or a squid,

or a coconut,

or Ohio,

or Buddha,

or Cher.

Imagine that your uncle died and in his will he left you his beloved old wooden boat. You love your uncle and out of respect for him you decide that you’re going to fix up his old boat, making it good as new. And so you start with the hull, replacing the old boards with new ones. But as you work rebuilding the hull, you realize that the deck needs replacing as well. And so the next year, you remove all of the boards on the deck and replace them with new ones, plank by plank, until the boat has an entirely new deck. But spending all that time working on the deck convinces you that the hardware isn’t reliable; you’re not sure which pieces would work if you were to actually launch the boat, and which would snap with the slightest strain. And so you set out to replace all of the hardware. . . . If you keep this up, at some point you will have replaced the entire boat, and yet when you take your friends out for a ride, you will tell them that this is the boat your uncle left you in his will.

The enduring reality of the boat, then, is in the pattern, not the planks.

The planks come and go, but the pattern remains. You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet precisely consistent. Some have said we’re like “light at the end of a spinning stick.”

The basic elements of life are actually quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others. The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, and stars, we’re all made of the same stuff.

You share over 60 percent of your genes with fruit flies, you share over 90 percent of your genes with mice, and you share 96 percent of your DNA with the large apes.

So when you read about aging singers or actors or politicians who used to be stars—well yes, of course they were . . . we all used to be stars.

One of my sons recently had a loose tooth that was driving him crazy. He’d sit at the table while we ate dinner, hand in his mouth, moving the tooth back and forth, trying to loosen it enough for it to come out. Day after day, talking about it and fussing with it and telling us just how badly he wanted it to come out. And then it came out—while we were at the beach. He started jumping up and down in the sand, celebrating, doing one of those dances that only an eleven-year-old boy can do, hoisting his now-removed tooth above his head, victorious.

He then turned to me and asked: If he threw it in the ocean, would he still get something from the tooth fairy? I said yes, feeling free to speak on behalf of the tooth fairy, who happened to be sitting next to me in a swimsuit.

And so he ran up to the waterline,

cocked his arm back,

and threw his tooth into the ocean.

I tell you this story because at some point today you will eat. You will eat for several reasons, chief among them being survival. If you don’t eat, you die, because your body needs food. And food comes from the Earth. It’s planted, watered, cultivated, exposed to the sun, and then harvested, transported, prepared, and placed on your plate. Between the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil, that food received what it needed to keep you alive.

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